One of the major attractions of an Android OS is its great library of applications, though keeping applications up-to-date can sometimes become a drag. By default, Google Play downloads updates for your Android applications, but this does not always happen at a convenient time, and sometimes, you can even lose some of your important unsaved data once the application gets updated. Also, an update can change an app’s behavior, which may not be something you want. So to avoid these issues, you can specify when and how you want to receive updates for your applications.

Steps

Part 1

Stopping Automatic Updates

1

Launch Google Play. Tap on Google Play’s icon to open it.

The icon looks like a shopping bag with a triangle in it.

Google Play is the application store from where you can download all the available applications for the Android platform; even the updated version of the installed applications needs to be installed from Google Play. So you can say that Google Play is the one-stop shop for all the Android-related applications and games.

2

Open the menu. Tap on the top-left icon with three stripes to view Google Play’s menu.

3

Go to Settings. Tap “Settings” from the options shown in the menu.

4

Click on the “Auto update apps.” On the Settings menu, click on the option that reads “Auto update apps.” This will open up a dialog box providing some of the options to select from.

5

Select “Do not auto-update apps” from the dialog box. This will disable automatic update of Android applications.

Part 2

Updating Android Applications Individually

1

Go back to Google Play’s menu. After disabling automatic updates, go back to Google Play’s menu by tapping the three-striped icon at the top left of the screen.

You can also just use the “Back” button of your device.

2

Go to My Applications. Tap on the “My applications” option in the menu. This will open up a list of all the applications installed on your device, plus any other applications that are associated with your Google account, under the All tab.

3

Select an app to update. Applications for which new updates are available will appear at the top of the list, with a green Update label beside it. Now you can choose which application you want to update by tapping on it.

Tapping on an app will open up the application’s overview page.

4

Update the application. Tap on the “Update” button on the application’s overview page to update the application. This will download the available update onto your device and install the updated version of the application.

Once the update is done, a notification will appear in the notification bar stating that the said application is successfully updated.